Saturday, 23 August 2014

In
our allegedly ‘historically-informed’ times, it has become unfashionable to
laud Herbert von Karajan’s work in Classical repertoire. So much the worse for
fashion. From Mozart’s divertimenti to Haydn’s oratorios, much of his finest
work is to be found here. Karajan’s recordings of The Creation – especially that made with the Berlin Philharmonic,
but also, more for connoisseurs, that with the Vienna Philharmonic – have long
been esteemed by all but the most dogmatic authenticists. His account of The Seasons, however, like the work
itself, has tended to be obscured by the shadow of its admittedly sublime predecessor.Berlin Philharmonic outings had not been
frequent; Karajan’s 1972 performances, after which this recording was made,
were his first and last, though he had also conducted the work in Aachen, in
1938, his chorus master the legendary Wilhelm Pitz, later of both Bayreuth and
the Philharmonia Chorus. Indeed, since a 1944 cathedral performance conducted
by Rudolf Lamy, the Berlin orchestra had given the work only once, under Fritz
Weisse (1966); subsequent performances have taken place but once a decade: Hans
Hilsdorf (1987), Wolfgang Sawallisch (1998), and Sir Simon Rattle (2003).

Karajan’s
large-scale approach stands far truer to Haydn’s intentions and inspiration,
born of giant Handel commemorations in London, than what we tend to hear today.
The ferocity of the brass in the opening to ‘Spring’ might come as a surprise;
it makes good pictorial as well as proto-Beethovenian sense. Winter harshness
must be banished, before spring might be welcomed: the beguiling Berlin oboe,
clarinet, bassoon soloists preparing the way for the ravishing tones of Gundula
Janowitz. The picturesque fares well throughout, Karajan resisting the
temptation, all-too-frequent for many conductors in this music, to underline
it, whilst imparting not only the desired grand scale but also, more
importantly, harmonic understanding and drive that can well be described as
symphonic, the oratorio rightly understood in the context of the ‘London’
Symphonies and the late masses. Werner Hollweg and Walter Berry, the other
soloists, make up a typical Karajan solo consort, well supported by the
Deutsche Oper chorus. ‘Supported’, though, is hardly the right word: these
singers are participants, not least in the
final number’s joyous, yet hardly portentous, Resurrection of the dead.
Karajan, his chorus, the Berlin wind players show themselves alert to the
resonances with Die Zauberflöte when
the holy mount crowned by a canopy appears, peace and tranquility enthroned.
Haydn’s use, echoing Handel’s Israel in
Egypt, of a double chorus, for what appears to be the first time in his
œuvre and is unquestionably the last, offers exultance in performance too. One
can only regret that Karajan did not perform more of Haydn’s choral music; of
the masses, he seems only to have conducted the Nelson, and that in 1959, for Vienna’s commemoration of the
composer’s death 150 years earlier.

The
other two works in this collection received multiple Karajan recordings and
performances. Karajan gave Beethoven’s Missa
solemnis throughout his life, his first performances again in Aachen and
again with Pitz, in 1937, his final thoughts delivered at the 1986 Salzburg
Festival. There is a true sense of majesty to the present recording, in many
ways quite different from Karajan’s earlier EMI recording, in which he had
approached the throne of the Almighty – and Beethoven – almost as supplicant,
conscious of the gulf separating God – or composer – and man. Here, Karajan apparently
speaks in something approaching the first person. The opening of the ‘Credo’
sounds hewn not of the aural granite we often, quite rightly, hear invoked for
Klemperer, but of marble. ‘Marmoreal’ is often employed, quite mysteriously, as
a reproach; here Karajan puts his fabled and increasing fondness for orchestral
beauty to good dramatic use. What detractors might call ‘gloss’ offers its own
mystical self-justification, consonant both with plausible reading of the work
and of Beethoven’s conceivable ‘intentions’. There is quasi-operatic drama too:
the soloists’ stabbing cries of ‘Crucifixus’, and, punctuating Thomas Brandis’s
sweet-toned ‘Benedictus’ violin solo, imploring solo and choral calls of ‘In
nomine Domini’. Perhaps Karajan’s and his orchestra’s experience in Italian
opera plays a part too. Yet the notorious cries of war, vocal and orchestral,
in the ‘Agnus Dei’ are anything but melodramatic; that brutality which
occasionally, for some, disfigures Karajan’s orchestral Beethoven here chills
as it must. And ultimately, if Karajan is not necessarily the first choice of
many as exemplar of humility, the listener may nevertheless well find himself
humbled through experience of often-exquisite majesty: the beauty of holiness?

This
recording of Brahms’s Ein deutsches
Requiem stands in a still-longer tradition. Karajan’s final performance
would be in Salzburg, in 1988, just a year before his death; for his first
account, we once again return to Aachen and Pitz, fifty-two years earlier.
Karajan conducted the work there four times before the outbreak of war, after
which he would return to it in Vienna, in preparation for his first recording,
also on EMI, to be heard elsewhere in this series. Here, as earlier, the
recording is definitely of its time – which is not intended in any sense as an
adverse criticism. Performance and recording alike announce a plusher sound
than in the first recording. As with Haydn, we hear Brahms in the light and
shadow of his symphonies – and Karajan’s conception of them – but there is
thoroughly musical drama, triumph and consolation, in both. There is no need
for histrionics in ‘Denn alles Fleisch’. Cumulative power speaks for itself:
well-rehearsed, yes, for there can never be any doubting Karajan’s consummate
professionalism, but not manicured. Solos are sung by a radiant Anna
Tomowa-Sintow, who would be Karajan’s new Marschallin, thereby following in the
footsteps of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in both Brahms and Strauss, and with the
equally rounded tones of José van Dam. This recording then, maintains tradition
in the form of the Wiener Singverein and, of course, the Berlin Philharmonic,
yet also looks to the future, even to the end: two movements from a work he
cherished would be performed at the Vienna Philharmonic’s Karajan Salzburg
memorial concert on 30 July 1989.